Archives

Meta

eBooks Future

1. The traditional publishing business is incredibly inefficient. It absorbs most of the dollars paid for a book before they get to its creator. That reduces our favorite authors’ incentive to write more books. Consolidation and other changes in publishing are limiting the availability of books and short stories. Ebooks could theoretically solve all of these problems.

2. People have been predicting the imminent takeoff of a mass market for ebooks since the late 1970s. It didn’t happen then, and it’s not happening now.

3. Unlike emusic, there are major structural barriers to the broad adoption of ebooks. The problem is not just technological. The most important barrier is a chicken and egg situation: People won’t buy an ebook reader until there are millions of ebooks available for it, but there won’t be lots of ebooks available for an ebook reader until it has millions of users.

4. Until we break that logjam, the mass market for ebooks will never develop.